E1: Teen Help Line; S14: Sigh... Narrow Shoulders (Season Opener)

<p>A special hello to anyone who clicked because you saw Dolly Parton on the cover.</p><p>I understand.</p><p>Dolly died this week, at 80, and I don't think we quite knew what that was going to feel like until it happened.</p><p>For me, it has had something of the quality of the Challenger explosion. Maybe it even exceeded it—not because the events are comparable, obviously, but because of what they do to the emotional atmosphere. Challenger happened while I was working on a teen helpline, and that night people called about everything. The shuttle blew up, and suddenly whatever grief they had already been carrying had someplace to go.</p><p>Dolly feels a little like that.</p><p>A very large, very familiar person disappears from the culture, and suddenly all these smaller disappearances start rattling around.</p><p>Which is how we arrive at Keith.</p><p>Keith is the boy on the right in the photograph. I'm the one on the left. Santa, as far as I know, is Santa.</p><p>The original photograph also contained two girls, neither of whom deserved to be erased from history merely to improve my podcast artwork.</p><p>But I erased them anyway.</p><p>Artificial intelligence made this disturbingly easy.</p><p>The funny thing is that one of the girls actually was Keith's girlfriend at the time, and after they broke up, I dated her.</p><p>That happened more than once.</p><p>I was not dating Keith's ex-girlfriends because I was especially interested in dating girls. I was interested in Keith. Dating his girlfriends after he was finished with them apparently made some kind of sense to my adolescent nervous system.</p><p>The other girl was my friend Karin Robbins, whom I still know. She is also a counsellor now. So if this photograph appears on social media, I can tag her and give her an opportunity to discover that she has been removed from a Christmas photograph and replaced by Dolly Parton.</p><p>You're welcome, Karin.</p><p>And then, because simply deleting two women from a decades-old photograph wasn't absurd enough, I asked AI to put Dolly in the corner waving.</p><p>I was genuinely surprised by how convincingly it produced a Dolly-like character. I had vaguely assumed there would be some rule against that—as though Dolly herself owned the legal rights to enormous blonde hair, rhinestones and being delighted to see you.</p><p>Apparently my understanding of intellectual property is about as sophisticated as my understanding of most things discussed in this episode.</p><p>For clarity: I do own this photograph.</p><p>I do not own Dolly Parton.</p><p>I don't think anyone ever did.</p><p>And the amount of labour involved in removing Keith's girlfriends was dramatically less than the emotional labour involved in Dolly dying, which was itself perhaps dramatically less than the labour involved in being a teenager answering a helpline while the Challenger exploded.</p><p>There may be a measurement problem here.</p><p>Because this episode eventually gets around to a song about celebrating my life. Then I made a monologue that would contextualize the song and all its dead people.</p><p>Some famous.</p><p>Some not.</p><p>Some who died of AIDS.</p><p>Some from overdose.</p><p>Some by suicide.</p><p>One who flew off a cliff.</p><p>And one boy—the boy who flew off the cliff—I remember him mostly because he had a dimple, beautiful brown eyes, very good hair, narrow shoulders, and knew what I was supposed to do with hairspray.</p><p>Before I knew what any of that meant.</p><p>That's probably why this photograph is here.</p><p>Not because it's a photograph of death.</p><p>It's a photograph from before.</p><p>Before Keith became somebody I would remember as dead.</p><p>Before I learned to organize people into causes of death.</p><p>Before I knew that attraction could become identity, identity could become danger, grief could become repression, and a cute boy's shoulders could survive in memory much longer than almost anything else.</p><p>So yes, Dolly is on